Perhaps none of Roth’s fiction can bear the term “a mirage of representation” better than Operation Shylock. The term “a mirage of representation” indicates a political connotation as well as an aesthetic one. One the one hand, the political connotation of the term refers to Rancière’s critique of the “buffooneries of representation” pervading the
French political scene after the 1848 revolution (381). As Rancière writes in his insightful yet relatively less-read essay, “How to Use Lire le Capital,” the 1850s was a time “when men of power wore the costumes of a different political play in order to represent interests directly opposed to those they were supposed to represent” (380).12 As a critique, “a mirage of representation” bears the dynamic of resisting and disrupting existing regimes and systems.
On the other hand, the aesthetic connotation of the term refers to the metafictional aspect that Rancière observes in the act of representation: “the divergence is no longer between reality and the illusions of ideologues, but between a scene whose reality is that of representation and the device which sustains it” (380-81, emphasis original). My appropriation of “a mirage of representation” refers to the mirage of narratives conjured up by Roth in Operation
Shylock. These “mirages” includes the uncanny “double Roths,” the contradictory peritexts of the text, and the mirage-like narratives implemented by Roth to complicate the idea of
expressing personal identity/ies. Through these “mirage of representations,” Roth presents precisely in Operation Shylock the divergence between “a scene whose reality in that of representation and the device which sustains it” through transgressing literary genres, playing with metafictional narratives and problematizing the relation between the form and content of
12 As Jim Kincaid writes in “A Critique of Value-Form Marxism,” Rancière’s 1976 article, “How to Use Lire le Capital,” appears to be a “scintillating but neglected paper” (107) in view of recent Marxist studies.
a text.
Published in 1993, Operation Shylock seems to be a fiction, although the first-person narrative adopted throughout the text, as well as the subtitle suggest its confessional nature.
More precisely, this “confession” tells the story of how Philip Roth the writer meets his imposter while both of them are in Israel attending the trial of John Demjanjuk—or according to the Holocaust survivors, “Ivan the Terrible,” who acted as a guard in the Treblinka camp during WWII. In fact, Demjanjuk has been on trial multiple times in Israel, and verdicts were repeatedly overthrown and appeals unwaveringly filed. One of the most notable trials
convicted Demjanjuk in 1988, but the verdict was later overturned in 1993, which is what will be “attended and described” in Operation Shylock (Roth 13).
Paralleling the ambiguity over the true identity of John Demjanjuk—whether he is indeed “Ivan the Terrible”—is the even more bewildering identity crisis of the multiple
“Philip Roths” in the text. As Roth in the text “confesses,” knowing the existence of Moishe Pipik, the imposter, haunts him for he thinks that “a person’s identity is his private property”
and this private realm cannot “be appropriated by somebody else” (75). Moreover, as Josh Cohen observes, characters that are subject to the dynamic of “doubles” also include the
“inner Roth” and the “external Roth”: “Even if he[Roth] should never again meet the
double … the very thought of his presence in the world condemns him to ‘insufferable sieges of confusion’” (84). Following Cohen’s thought, I read these sets of characters, which
function as sets of doubles, as Roth’s problematization of personal identity as whole and united entity. By creating these sets of similar yet different characters, Roth demonstrates how complicated the idea of personal identity can be and the difficulties of narrating one’s identity. As Smilesburger, Roth’s Mossad handler, says to Roth near the end of Operation
Shylock, “[t]he divisiveness is not just between Jew and Jew—it is within the individual Jew … inside every Jew there is a mob of Jews. The good Jew, the bad Jew. The new Jew, the old Jew. The lovers of Jews, the hater of Jews” (334). The performativity of personal as well as ethnic identity, the representation and mis-representation of the self, the representation of other self(ves) are all related to the identity crisis that sits at the core of Operation Shylock.
Together, these “Roths” form “a mirage of representation” that manifests Roth’s attempt to write on the border of realistic confession and fictional inventions in Operation Shylock. For instance, the characters in Operation Shylock, while involving realistic people around Roth, also include fictional inventions which ironically declare themselves to be authentic, or to be “truer than real.” Consider the following episode in which Moishe Pipik tries to convince Roth that he the imposter is the “real” Roth:
‘You go around pretending to be me.’
This brought the smile back—‘You go around pretending to be me,’ he loathsomely replied.
‘You exploit the physical resemblance,’ I went on, ‘by telling people that you are the writer, the author of my books.’
‘I don’t have to tell them anything. They take me for the author of those books right off.
It happens all the time.’ (72)
According to Pipik’s line of thought, he is by no means responsible for the identity crisis of Roth, since it is “they”—namely, the general mass who read the news about him—that take him for “the author of those books.” This logic of defense suggests that the recognition of the self lies not in the immanence of the subject but rather in how others perceive him/her. The more conventional understanding of the self is hitherto challenged by this breaking of the
“law,” as in Roth’s reply to Pipik’s defense: “the law … says a person’s identity is his private property and can’t be appropriated by somebody else” (75). In this conversation, the law that
requires the unity and the particularity of one’s personal identity is problematized, challenged, and perhaps even transgressed.
As Debra Shostak suggests, “the reader is displaced from identification with the narrating voice when the author seems to hold the position of the subject. The novel resists the imaginative act that every reader engages in when confronted by a work of fiction” (33).
Applying the “narrating voice” of a “confession” in Operation Shylock, Roth drastically problematizes the question of literary genre and narrative. The resistance of the imaginative act pointed out by Shostak, further contributes to another level of “a mirage of
representation” by involving Roth “the author” in the text. First, we have Roth the author who wrote the novel Operation Shylock, and secondly, we also have the Roth in the text who seems to provide the confessional narrative that carries out the plot of the novel. In other words, while Debra Shostak reads the authoritative voice of Philip Roth as the displacement from identification on the reader’s end, I read the authoritative voice as yet another guise, another representation that gathers into a “mirage of representation” that further complicates the narrative aesthetic of Operation Shylock.
There is, moreover, a third Roth that presides in this mirage of representation. This Roth is an imposter who advocates a radical counter-Zionist ideology called “Diasporism.”
He is later referred as “Moishe Pipik” by Roth the narrator. The fourth Roth appears in the episode where the real Philip Roth in the text pretends to be Pierre Roget, a French columnist who is interviewing Philip Roth—played by Moishe Pipik—on the cause and effect of the
“diasporist” movement taking place in Israel at that moment. This Roth, who avoids being exposed while trying to interview his own imposter, can be seen as another representation of the entangled identities, another pressing identity crisis of the personae “Philip Roth.” An
interesting scene, which I will discuss below, appears emblematically and characteristically Rothian: intense yet humorous, absurd yet nakedly sharp, all topped off with a sly treat of confusion.
The deliberate confusion of narrative voices and authorial personae present in Operation Shylock has attracted scholars who work in the fields of autobiography, fiction, and Jewish American literature. Derek Parker Royal notes for instance that the paratexts of Operation Shylock render the factuality of the text extremely ambiguous (32-33). Although written in confessional, first-person narrative, the content of the book—especially the paratexts—indicates conversely its fictionality. Paratexts, referred to as “a guiding sets of directions,” for Gérard Genette appear to be what surround and extend the text “precisely in order to present it” (1-2, emphasis original). According to Gérard, paratexts can be further divided into peritexts and epitexts with the former referring to the paratext within a text, such as the preface, the title of the text and chapters, and the author’s name, while the latter
referring to the paratexts that came into being since the publication of the text, such as interviews, reviews, as well as public acclaims.13 While the epitext of Operation Shylock renders it a work of fiction, the peritext of Operation Shylock seems to complicate the verisimilitude of this “confession” even more.
While the Preface declares the text as “an accurate account” that presents the “actual occurrences that I [Roth] lived through during [his] middle fifties and that culminated, early in 1988” (13), the ending “Note to the Reader” suggests that “this book is a work of fiction”
which consists of “products of the author’s imagination” (399). According to the ending
“Note to the reader,” “any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,
13 For further discussions on paratexts and autobiographical writings, see Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation by Gérard Genette (1997).
is entirely coincidental,” and that the confession is indeed “false” (399). Nevertheless, the episode in which Roth’s interviews Aharon Appelfeld, the famous Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor, in Israel is later collected as a non-fictional piece in Roth’s Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (2001). Moreover, some passages from the interview appear in Operation Shylock without even the tiniest amendment.14 If so, how should Roth’s readers apprehend the peritexts of the “confession”? Immediately we get a sense of how Roth’s paratexts go beyond the text they caption and involve other texts.
According to Parker Royal, the exact meaning of the peritexts in Operation Shylock is rather irrelevant to the overall reading of the text, as Royal suggests, “Roth does not require that we ultimately distinguish fact from fiction” (32). For Royal, Roth’s ‘operation’ is a probing into the “comfortable differentiation” between what is fabricated and what is true (31-32). In this case, Operation Shylock, as well as most of Roth’s works, can be seen as the novelist’s attempt to write in between fiction and autobiography. Complicating the
understanding/reading of peritexts even more, Royal points out the plural indication of the final admission: “Is it the ‘confession,’ of fiction as expressed in the Note is false, or is the entire text itself, one that professes verisimilitude and whose subtitle bears the word
‘confession,’ that is false?” (32). Royal’s question concerns two emphatically contrasting readings of the text: if “the ‘confession,’ of fiction as expressed in the Note is false,” then the reader can confirm that the peritext of Operation Shylock declares itself autobiographical.
However, if the Note to Reader suggests that “the entire text itself, one that professes verisimilitude and whose subtitle bears the word ‘confession’” is false, the peritexts of
14 For instance, see pages 85-86 in Operation Shylock and page 27-28 in Shop Talk. The section in Operation Shylock which contains Roth interviewing Aaron Appelfeld appears as well in Shop Talk without the tiniest amendments. The non-fictionality of Shoptalk therefore adds to the overall verisimilitude of Operation Shylock.
Operation Shylock indicate the text’s own fictionality.
Performing its ambiguous signifying function on multiple layers, the peritexts of Operation Shylock function more than metafictional practices in the sense that they not only reveal how the text comes into being but also undermine its own legitimacy. Moreover, they also echo the thematic concern of expressing one’s identity through narration in the sense that the reader cannot decide if the Preface or the ending Note is the more believable, just as readers find it difficult to identify the “real” Roth in Operation Shylock. In other words, the truer Roth insists the texts are, the falser it seems. The writing of Operation Shylock per se, in this light, can be read as not only meta-fictionally self-sufficient but also self-cancelling and self-countering. Such self-countering writing can also be seen in Roth’s other works. As Josh Cohen points out, in the penultimate chapter of Deception (1990), the harder the writer
“Philip” tries to prove that his affair is merely “fiction,” the truer it seems to both his wife and his readers: “his insistence on the fiction laity of the affair only intensifies it … the affair remains permanently suspended between fiction and reality, such that to read the novel is to be condemned irremediably to deception” (82). The same logic goes on in Operation Shylock as Cohen observes: “the more he [the Roth in the text] strives to differentiate himself from his false counterpart [Moishe Pipik], the more undifferentiated they become” (Cohen 92).
Addressing the self-countering logic of Roth’s writings, Michael Rothberg argues that Roth’s self-countering trait actually bespeaks Roth’s identity as a Jewish American. The counter-writing in Operation Shylock is for Rothberg the marker of Roth’s original representation of the Holocaust: “Emphasizing the Holocaust’s distance rather than its overwhelming proximity leads to … Roth’s quite original perspective on the Shoah: the greater the significance accorded to the Holocaust as an event of modern history, the more
distant a role it plays in the lives of American Jews” (53). Though primarily focusing on how the Holocaust is represented in Roth’s works—either as backdrop or deliberate absence—
Rothberg’s argument foregrounds the self-countering logic of Operation Shylock in the sense that it evokes something when precisely undermining it.
Rothberg’s reading of how Roth’s writings represent the divergence between
American-Jewish people and the victims of the Shoah further foregrounds the political aspect of Operation Shylock. This divergence preserves the political dimension of “a mirage of representations” in Rancière’s original use. In the sense that the “mirage of representation” in Operation Shylock serves as the volatile bond by which Roth connects with his Jewish identity and along with it, the entire communal history and memory. In Rancière’s original use, the political dimension of “a mirage of representation” serves as a critique of the political state of Paris 1850. In my usage, the “mirages of representation” in Operation Shylock becomes a critique, or rather an alternative, to most literary representations of the Shoah.
For Emily Miller Budick, however, the ingenious narrative devices, along with the multiple (mis)representations of personal identity, differentiate Operation Shylock from a
“political tract” and makes it “fiction.” Reading Operation Shylock alongside The Counterlife (1986)—one of Roth’s earlier novels which is also set in Israel—Budick suggests that by bracketing the text in countering peritexts, Roth problematizes the notion of attaching a simplistic “responsibility” to an author and his/her works. For Budick, the ending note of Operation Shylock reveals the fact that not only the confessor gets to decide what is presented in the text but also Roth’s Mossad handler, Smilesburger, can attempt to “impose on Roth and his writing” (68-73). Smilesburger’s imposition on the text, still, by no means seals the text
into a final say, for it is still met with the reader’s resistance, which the “Preface” of the fiction emphatically informs.
An episode in which Roth is locked inside a room with Smileburger who verges on threatening him to alter the final chapter of the book he is writing, which is, Operation Shylock (387-389), demonstrates how “a mirage of representation” presides in between both the content and the form of Operation Shylock. The form of the text seems to be itself a
“mirage of representation” since the text borders on confession and fiction. The literary genres of confession and fiction, in this case, become “mirages” in Operation Shylock since both genres seem to be engaged with but also not quite exactly so.
On the content level, the preface urges the reader to believe, and the ending note suggests otherwise. Moreover, the incident between Smilesburger and Roth further complicates the peritexts of Operation Shylock. As Roth in the text reveals, Smilesburger politely requires Roth to alter the end of the novel or publish it without the ending, while locking him inside a room for hours. Roth’s reply to Smilesburger’s “offer”—“Not possible.
Not possible in anyway”—demonstrates his veracity to present the true account of the events he witnesses (287). Not only does Roth in the text think the offer preposterous, he goes on to accuse Smilesburger for recruiting him as a secret agent in the first place:
You yourself drew my attention to the professional possibilities the operation offered.
As an enticement, if you recall. ‘I see quite a book coming out of this,’ you told me … It was what you said that put it into my mind. And now that I’ve written that book you’ve changed your mind and decided that what would truly make it a better book, for your purpose if not mine (382).
Smilesburger’s rationale appears, however, not entirely insane because according to his reasoning, preventing Roth from publishing the last chapter will protect Roth from political
revenge which the ending chapter of the text apparently incites.15
As Smilesburger confesses, “I am responsible to you … I recruited you, perhaps even with a false enticement and now I will do everything to prevent your exposing yourself to the difficulties that the publication of this last chapter could cause for a very long time to come”
(386). Here we encounter not only the question concerning the artist’s autonomy but also the collaboration between the form and content of Operation Shylock. The collaboration of form and content can be found in Roth’s final decision: “I cannot know things-in-themselves, but you can. I cannot transcend myself, but you can. I cannot exist apart from myself, but you can. I know nothing beyond my own existence and my own ideas, my mind determines entirely how reality appears to me, but for you the mind works differently. You know the world as it really is, and I know it only as it appears” (392). In short, the writer Roth refuses absolutely. Even until the last page of the novel, Smilesburger is still persuading Roth to do him and himself “a little favor” in exchange for a suitcase apparently filled with money.
When at last the narrative ends with the ambiguous “Let your Jewish conscience be your guide” (398), it marks again the presence of the author by putting a stop to the plot in an ambiguous point so as to end the story in suspension.
When at last the narrative ends with the ambiguous “Let your Jewish conscience be your guide” (398), it marks again the presence of the author by putting a stop to the plot in an ambiguous point so as to end the story in suspension.